Appearing this morning on CNN, Donald Trump was asked how Madoff managed to dupe so many people so many times (hat tip to ClusterStock):

People were greedy. They thought he was going to get them a little bit more return, or a lot more return. I mean, he was a Svengali for rich people. There are Svengalis for women; this guy was a Svengali for rich people -- very rich people. But when you think of a person putting up 100 percent of their net worth and even mortgaging their house, even though they had a lot of cash -- mortgaging their house to get more cash to this guy -- and now they're going to have to go out, literally, and maybe work in a drugstore. I don't know what they're going to do.

Trump says he didn't lose any money in the scandal.